Daily Newsletter Experiment: 3,714 Subscribers in 30 Days

What started as a simple idea to test cross-promotions turned into one of the more successful newsletter experiments I’ve ever run.

My “30 Days of Growth” pop-up newsletter generated 3,714 subscribers in just 30 days, with 1,757 being completely new to my audience.

You can also listen to a podcast episode recap of this experiment here.

More importantly, it created a blueprint that other newsletter operators are already copying.

Here’s a breakdown of how I did it, what worked, what didn’t, and the key lessons for anyone considering their own pop-up newsletter campaign.

How This All Started

I was running a cross-promotion challenge in my Growth in Reverse Pro community to learn how to do better collaborations and get data about how they worked, etc.

With a typical cross promotion, you do one per email. Since I send my email on Sundays, I realized I have only had 4-5 opportunities during this challenge.

That wasn’t enough. I wanted more data for the community so I can share how to do these better.

So I thought – what if I did a daily newsletter that would run for 30 days. I could share one growth lever per day, and each would feature a different creator and thus, be a cross promotion in itself.

I quickly decided this was a great idea and was going to launch it in about 2 weeks. (One day I’ll figure out why I love self-imposed deadlines that end up falling during times when I’ll be out of town).

I pretty much started it and launched it on a whim – building the parachute on the way down.

So, I got to work. I decided I should write a few to see how this could actually work, and build a format that would be replicable for all 30 days.

The Structure

I needed a really solid template for this 30 day challenge. I turned to ChatGPT (or as my friend Becky calls it “ChatDaddy” 🤦‍♀️) to help create a consistent format.

Here’s what we ended up with:

Introduction: a few sentences about the creator and a link to their newsletter (these are cross promotions after all)
What did they do? A quick breakdown of the tactic
Why did it work? The reasons this was super smart – in bullet point format
What were the results? The metrics or data they had around what happened (subscriber growth, % growth, etc.)
How you could implement it. I wanted this 30 Days to be super valuable for readers, so this section was a must.

Coming from someone who loves to publish 3,000-5,000 word deep dives, this constraint was one of the harder pieces of this whole challenge.

Having this set template was a forcing function to get me to shut up faster than I normally would in my writing 🙂 And I got a lot of emails (more than I’d like to count) about how this short format was great and people enjoyed it.

Excuse me while I go weep for my deep dives and longer posts.

How I Chose Creators to Reach Out To

Now that I had a template, I needed 30 tactics from 30 creators. Easy, right?

I started creating a Google Sheet with the names of people I wanted to reach out to. Many of them were people I went to because of something I’d seen them do around growth and optimization, so they were selected based on that.

Others I knew had done cool things, but I didn’t know exactly what those were yet.

Rather than focusing solely on large audiences, I tried to mix up newsletter sizes. Some people have smaller audiences and get more engaged people on their list.

Size is not everything, so I wanted to include a mix of large and “small” newsletters.

And I just started reaching out one by one via email and social DM (if that’s where we interacted more).

⭐ If you want the templates and video walkthroughs of how I created this pop-up newsletter, check out the companion course to the 30 Days of Growth. You’ll also get a video vault of growth levers and the onboarding strategies you can use to build raving fans.

The Value Exchange

Here’s how the cross-promotion worked in terms of what each side got.

What featured creators got:

Callouts in each growth lever edition
Links embedded throughout the content
Promotion on multiple platforms (email, Substack, on my website)

What they gave in return:

A shoutout of the 30 Days of Growth with a link to sign up

It was pretty simple on their end. In my opinion, all they had to do was share the 30 days of growth in an email, preferably, but some did it on social media.

The Launch Strategy

When it comes to the launch strategy, remember that I was putting this together in about two weeks, so there are a ton of things I would’ve done differently.

But here is what actually came to fruition.

I promoted the campaign across several channels:

Growth in Reverse newsletter mentions to my 40,000+ subscribers
LinkedIn posts and engagement
Podcast mentions including a special “exploding episode” that self-destructed after 7 days
A post on Substack notes
Website navigation – I changed my main subscribe button to point to 30 Days of Growth

Why not just opt in all your subscribers?

One of the biggest questions I got was: “Why didn’t you just blast this to your whole list?”

I contemplated this for about half of a second, but then realized something important.

My reasoning was simple: If I signed up for a weekly email, and someone just started sending me daily emails for thirty days, I’d be like, whoa. What’s happening here?

I didn’t love that experience for people. Would I do it differently next time? I’m not sure.

I moved on and didn’t do that. But there was also the issue of the giveaway. I’ll talk about this more below, but everyone who joined the 30 Days of Growth got entered to win.

If I had just added all of the people to the list, they would all get included in the giveaway.

I didn’t feel like that was fair to those who intentionally signed up.

Referrals and the Giveaway

This is the part of the story where things quickly got out of hand. Haha. I’m realizing that I can’t do anything small.

And after starting to plan out the 30 Days of Growth, I knew I wanted to incorporate a giveaway.

To help incentivize sharing, I implemented a giveaway system with multiple prize tiers. I wanted to reach out to a few brands to see if they would give some licenses away to people. Here’s where we netted out with those:

Annual licenses from Senja (social proof tool)
Annual licenses from Tella (video tool)
Annual licenses from RightMessage (email segmentation and personalization tool)
Two licenses to Justin Moore’s Brand Deal Wizard course ($1,000+ value each)

I created a banner image to put on each post on this website too, to reinforce this.

I also wanted to give away newsletter audits and coaching calls.

Of course, as I was starting to build out the giveaway, I realized that I needed a prize for someone referring just one person.

And I thought, “Why don’t I just record a private podcast and give that away if someone refers one person to the 30 Days of Growth?”

That can’t be that hard, right?

Narrator: She would soon realize it was that hard

We’ll talk more about that later, but here are what the referral numbers looked like: 356 of the 3,714 subscribers came through referrals (about 10% overall, or 20% of new subscribers).

One particularly interesting scenario came from this:

Someone from the GIR Pro community shared this series with a few friends. One referral (let’s call her “B”) then shared it with 15 more people. One of B’s referrals then came back and ended up with 21 of their own referrals.

The result? That single initial share ultimately brought in 36 new subscribers. Wild.

How Did Each Day Look?

Here’s the reality of running a daily newsletter for 30 days.

Daily Tasks:

Write the growth lever in Kit
Create a Canva image for each day
Copy content to WordPress for web version
Publish on Substack
Record a daily podcast episode for the private feed
Publish on LinkedIn newsletter

By day 10, I was struggling to keep up with the private podcast feed. The daily content creation, while manageable, became overwhelming when combined with travel and other commitments.

Whoops!

What Worked

Here are a few things that went well during the challenge:

1. Getting Replies

We all know replies are important, so I wanted to make sure I was getting those from the jump. I wanted to include a question that did 2 things:

Get replies
Help me understand more about the people signing up

I decided to go with a twist on an age-old question people love to use:

“Hit reply and let me know what is your biggest challenge right now with newsletter growth.“

I honestly don’t love this question – it makes people think and doesn’t get the highest reply rate in my experience. I can’t say I’ve ever replied when someone asked me the “what’s your biggest challenge” question.

But, I added a twist. Below the question, I gave a compelling reason for them to answer:

“Why? Because I might end up featuring a tip that helps you with your specific challenge.”

This two-part approach – asking the question AND giving them a reason to answer – generated about 200 replies in the first few days. The responses weren’t just one-liners but detailed paragraphs about their specific struggles.

Which also made it super hard for me to stay on top of. And sorry if you’re someone I haven’t replied to yet, I’m getting there!

2. The Referrals

I mentioned above that almost 10% of people who joined came from a referral. I think that’s a big win.

3. The Quality of Subscribers

You might look at this and think – all that work for 1700 subscribers? First, that’s a lot of freaking people. And second, the quality of these subscribers is mind-boggling. Some of them are huge names at big companies and brands, and others are “smaller” creators who I am so excited have joined.

Either way, that segment of the audience has an almost 15% higher open rate than my list as a whole. Will that come down over time? Sure. But I see this as a big win.

But what I do know is “these are my people!”

What Didn’t Work

Of course, lots of things went wrong.

The LinkedIn Newsletter Experiment

I initially planned to publish each growth lever as a LinkedIn newsletter article, which got 1,611 subscribers on the platform.

But LinkedIn Newsletters aren’t real newsletters.

There is no email address exchange for you as the creator of the newsletter, so it’s really just akin to a subscriber list on YouTube or social followers.

And there was another drawback.

When you publish a LinkedIn newsletter article, LinkedIn forces you to share that on your feed.

So if you’re also trying to post every day on LinkedIn, you’re almost competing with yourself. I felt like these posts weren’t doing as well as a typical post would, and that was frustrating for me.

After about 7-10 days, I abandoned this strategy as it wasn’t driving meaningful conversions to my email list.

The Private Podcast

I love the idea of this, and if I were ahead of the game, I could have recorded all of these ahead of time, and it wouldn’t have been an issue.

But I didn’t. And I paid for it.

I went to two separate events and conferences during the 30 Days this was live, which meant I was recording on the road (or not), and ended up behind.

So overall, the idea was great, but the execution was bad.

Not Being Prepared

There were so many things I wanted to do on the marketing side for this series, but I just ended up not having the time to do them. Next time I want to prep better and have everything go off without a hitch (or the stress) haha!

The Monetization Add-On

This whole thing was not sponsored or monetized aside from including affiliate links here and there. But halfway through, I realized readers were overwhelmed with implementing these.

A lot of people were reading the growth levers, and they’re like “I don’t have time to implement this” or “I don’t know exactly how to do this one”, and they got stuck.

Which I never like to hear.

This led me to decide to create a companion course of sorts that provides video walkthroughs and templates for implementing the growth levers. But I couldn’t just give that away for free too, there’s a lot that goes into a product like that.

When I finish the course it will be around $200-$250.

But until then, I’m charging way less, and I decided to start the pricing out at $100, and just increase the price each week until it launches later in June.

This gives early customers the best deal (because they’re jumping in with less refined info on the course) and creates a little FOMO for people who missed out on the earlier pricing.

Plus, it’s fun and lights a fire under me to get this done because people are signing up at a price that is ridiculous in my eyes 🙂

You can learn more and see where the price is now over here.

Key Lessons for Your Pop-Up Newsletter

If you want to launch a pop-up content series like this, here are my biggest learnings.

1. Build in Exclusivity

The giveaway component was crucial for driving email signups over just reading the content elsewhere. Yes, the issues were published on LinkedIn and Substack, but if you didn’t actually subscribe, you didn’t get entered to win any of these prizes and you don’t get the private podcast feed.

So you have to go sign up for the email list. I think this was an important distinction.

2. Templatize Everything

Having a consistent structure made daily content creation manageable. Without the daily template and constraints of that, this would have been impossible.

3. Give Yourself Enough Prep Time

I wish I had given myself some permission to pump the brakes a bit and wait another week or two to actually launch this thing. Better preparation would have allowed for more strategic promotion and smoother collaboration and coordination.

I think 4 weeks would be ideal.

4. Plan for Creator Schedules

About 7 of the 29 featured creators couldn’t accommodate the timing and didn’t get a chance to promote it during the launch, which was another downside of just launching this on a whim.

People have publishing schedules and are more organized than I am, so this was challenging 🙂

5. Relationships Matter More Than Metrics

Beyond the subscriber numbers, the quality of people joining was huge. I’m not sure if this was a fluke or because it was such a dense format without the 3,000 word length.

Plus, this strengthened relationships with those 29 creators, many of whom are now coming into the GIR Pro community to do full blown sessions and AMAs, or will be asked to soon 🙂

Start with a clear template, build in sharing incentives, and give yourself more prep time than you think you need.

Would I Do It Again?

100% yes. And I will do it again. Stay tuned! 🙂

If you want to get a more behind-the-scenes look of how I set up the 30 Days of Growth, I’m adding it to the companion course at 30daysofgrowth.co/course – you’ll get templates, walkthroughs, and behind-the-scenes content.